A Storied Past Pops Up Inside A Chest

August 01, 2006|By DON STACOM; Courant Staff Writer

BRISTOL — An old musty trunk held the vestiges of sailor George Elliott's life: A hand-sewn sack with two whale's teeth and a walrus tooth, a pair of wooden cases with sextants, hundreds of yellowed letters and a stack of weathered journals about his voyages.

Nearly two centuries after Elliott sailed out of Stonington in search of whales and seals, his sailor's chest surfaced last year in the attic of a farmhouse 20 miles from the nearest shoreline. Its logbooks chronicle storms, crew sicknesses and whale kills as far as Patagonia and Rio de Janeiro, and a decidedly less-exotic freight-hauling trip from Hartford to Virginia.

Bristol antiques dealer Dick Blaschke hopes the artifacts will create a stir among historians and nautical museums: He is auctioning them off on Aug. 12.

No descendants or heirs have any interest in the meticulous logbooks that Elliott kept aboard the brigs, schooners and barks he sailed in the 1830s. They turned up at the Ives Farm in Cheshire after Elizabeth Ives, relative of a distant descendant, died last year.

As first mate on many of his voyages, Elliott maintained the daily logbooks and apparently kept them after returning home to Stonington. Entries on some pages include tiny hand-drawn whales, indicating the ship had killed one. Each is followed by the number of barrels of oil the creature produced.

The Brig Ulysses' journey from 1837 to 1838 was less successful; page after page shows only whale tails rising from the water. That indicated the whale got away.

``Some of the stories in here ... on the Brig Uxor book, there's a tail that shows they missed one. Elliott said the captain cut the whale loose after the boat steerer fell overboard. Then it looks like the whale came back and stove in the side [of the whaleboat],'' Blaschke said.

On another page is a hand-drawn coffin and the words ``At 11 p.m., Mr. Benjamin Sands, one of the runaway Negroes who was taken on board of the ship out of compassion departed this life.''

A journey on the schooner Energy was less eventful.

``Sept. 4, 1833. Left on mail stage for New London, fare $1,'' he wrote. It cost another dollar to ride the steamboat New England from Lyme to Rocky Hill, where he met a captain and crew preparing the Energy's rigging; Elliott joined the crew, sailed to Hartford for cargo, and delivered it to Virginia. The most notable event was the short Rocky Hill to Hartford leg, done under sail.

``I should have observed that there is always such a current getting down this river that it is impossible for a vessel to sail up against it except it be with a fair wind,'' he wrote.

Despite its age, the collection does not sound as rare as it might seem, said Lyles Forbes, curator of maritime arts and culture at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va.

``It doesn't sound like anything out of the ordinary for a person in the whaling industry. New Bedford, Peabody Essex, Mystic [museums] will all have examples of that,'' he said.

``But it's a nice thing because it's all from one person. The value is that it's accumulated by a single person, and it gives a more complete picture of this guy and the voyages he went on,'' Forbes said. ``But there are a good amount of [whaling] things that surface fairly regularly. You'll see logbooks crop up every couple of years.''